Cell Phone Service Outages Reported Across Eastern Iowa

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April 3, 2014 | 1:28 pm

CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa - Service has been partially repaired to those that experienced cell phone service outages overnight Wednesday. This affected users in Cedar Rapids, Dubuque, the Quad Cities and many other communities.

According to the city of Dubuque, a fiber optic cable cut in central Iowa affected Mediacom telephone and internet service, as well as U.S. Cellular phone service, in the Dubuque area. Services appeared to have been restored in Dubuque late Wednesday evening, but there may be service interruptions as repairs are finalized.

Residents who do not have phone service but need to request emergency assistance should use a neighbor's phone or go to their nearest fire station. Dubuque County 911 services are fully operational.

This cell tower outage is also impacting phone systems at the Linn County Sheriff's Office. 911 lines are working.

The outage also affected lottery machines in Cedar Rapids, which means some Powerball machines did not turn out tickets for the $360 million dollar drawing.

Mary Neubauer, with the Iowa Lottery, says as many as 50 stores in the Cedar Rapids/Marion area have been affected by this phone outage.

Some lottery machines run via satellite, others off of cell towers. It's those machines on cell towers that were not working. That left many people just wishing for a ticket, let alone the multi-million dollar jackpot. Ultimately a winning ticket was not sold for Wednesday's drawing, meaning the jackpot will move to the drawing this Saturday.